What a difference a day makes! Or, okay, say two days, maybe three …
Here’s Colin Powell’s statements today and yesterday 
on why the president used the uranium-Niger material in his State of the Union address and why Powell himself passed on those charges in his UN presentation.
According to Powell, the Niger uranium documents were “a reasonable statement at [the] time” the president used them in the State of the Union address on January 28th. But by the time Powell gave his presentation at the UN one week later, on February 5th, the charge “was not standing the test of time.”
Actually, according to reports from Newsweek and other news outlets in late May and early June, Powell spent February 1st through 4th going over the intelligence evidence in meetings at the CIA. (He derided much of it with what the late, great J. Anthony Lukas once famously called a ‘barnyard epithet’.) In any case, this would seem to show that the ‘test of time’ that the Niger evidence failed to stand stretched from January 29th, 2003 to February 1st, 2003.
Let’s go to the tape …
From today in Pretoria …
And at the time of the President’s State of the Union address, a judgment was made that that was an appropriate statement for the President to make. There was no effort or attempt on the part of the President, or anyone else in the administration, to mislead or to deceive the American people. The President was presenting what seemed to be a reasonable statement at that time — and it didn’t talk to Niger, it talked specifically about efforts to acquire uranium from nations that had it in Africa.
Subsequently, when we looked at it more thoroughly and when I think it’s, oh, a week or two later, when I made my presentation to the United Nations and we really went through every single thing we knew about all of the various issues with respect to weapons of mass destruction, we did not believe that it was appropriate to use that example anymore. It was not standing the test of time. And so I didn’t use it, and we haven’t used it since.
And from yesterday’s interview with the BBC …
MR. FREI: Two more brief ones, if I may, Niger and the issue of the allegations of the uranium exports to Iraq. You, yourself, if I am correct in thinking, thought that that was not a truthful allegation at the time it was made; is that right?
SECRETARY POWELL: The question is not truthfulness. The question is credibility at a moment in time.
MR. FREI: But you had your doubts about it, didn’t you?
SECRETARY POWELL: I did not use it in the formal presentation I made on the 5th of February because by then there was such controversy about it, and as we looked at all that we knew about it, it did not seem to be the kind of claim that I should take into the UN. [emphasis added]
What are we, the United States of Chopped Liver? Can’t we get the non-bogus intel briefing too? And since when are Republicans UN lovers? I’m lost …
